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5.1
Limit the Number of Movies
Two issues with movies:
• They draw the attention away from you as a presenter
• They never work (not quite but…)
The first issue is not the main one. Really, movies tend to cause the largest number of computer problems, the last thing you want to experience while giving your
talk. Movies that work well on your own laptop might not work at all on another one.
Ask yourself whether you really need that movie. But if you really do, here is
some advice:
• Also save the movie itself in a directory you can readily locate and run the movie
from outside your slide presentation software. But keep in mind that the movie
might still fail
• If your movie is a relatively simple one (for instance, a relatively short high
speed movie from a scientific experiment), create an animation within a slide, by
extracting a couple frames (equally spaced in time), and animate them with an
automatic time between frames (Sect. 5.3)
• Or… just be ready to proceed with your presentation without your movie. Have
a plan-B
Sound in movies can also be a concern. The hardware might not provide for any
sound. Or the sound might be too dim, or distorted. If possible, avoid sounds (see
Sect. 5.6).
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